GamesA willfully old school point-and-click reminded me why we put up with moon-logic puzzles in classic adventure games for so longWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesA willfully old school point-and-click reminded me why we put up with moon-logic puzzles in classic adventure games for so longWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Cosmic Void)
Twilight Oracleis a point-and-click adventure game in a style so traditional that it’s been unchanged since Sierra On-Line was on top of the world, and it’s aimed at an audience that already knows its mechanics so well they disappear into the lovely pixel-art background.
The old annoyances started when I put a cabbage in a cauldron and a girl gave me a 12V battery. I had no reason to think she had it, she had no reason to think I needed it, and yet when it appeared in my inventory, I knew that the fate of the universe depended on me finding the right place to put this thing. The battery promised me an answer to a question I would be asked in due time. But the ridiculousness of someone paying with a battery for cabbage soup was a warning that the question might be gibberish.
I know the signals. I’ve been here before, and Twilight Oracle wanted to take me back in time with it. There’s nothing new or subversive here, yet the hours I spent letting Twilight Oracle frustrate me helped me understand that these games still matter, and why.
Venturing back
I don’t know when people started announcing the death of adventure games, but I know it didn’t work. When LucasArts and Sierra stopped point-and-click development at the end of the ’90s it was a beheading, but only of a hydra. Many of the most significant games of the 2010s were heads on those regrown necks; Tim Schafer’s Broken Age Kickstarter changed the way games were financed, The Walking Dead taught videogame writers how to have characters remember things, and Five Nights at Freddy’s defined 2010s horror with a sadistic remix of mechanics from Night Trap for an audience too young to understand why it’s funny to compare things to Night Trap.
More on adventure classics(Image credit: LucasArts)-Every Sierra graphical adventure, ranked-How Hero-U avoided disaster to resurrect ’90s adventure game nostalgia-From floppy disks to the crowdfunding revolution, adventure RPG pioneers Lori and Corey Cole have seen it all-Classic LucasArts biker adventure Full Throttle still kicks ass-The secret history of LucasArts-Best Story 2022: The Case of the Golden Idol
More on adventure classics
(Image credit: LucasArts)-Every Sierra graphical adventure, ranked-How Hero-U avoided disaster to resurrect ’90s adventure game nostalgia-From floppy disks to the crowdfunding revolution, adventure RPG pioneers Lori and Corey Cole have seen it all-Classic LucasArts biker adventure Full Throttle still kicks ass-The secret history of LucasArts-Best Story 2022: The Case of the Golden Idol
(Image credit: LucasArts)
-Every Sierra graphical adventure, ranked-How Hero-U avoided disaster to resurrect ’90s adventure game nostalgia-From floppy disks to the crowdfunding revolution, adventure RPG pioneers Lori and Corey Cole have seen it all-Classic LucasArts biker adventure Full Throttle still kicks ass-The secret history of LucasArts-Best Story 2022: The Case of the Golden Idol
Add in the impact of visual novels, walking simulators, hidden object games, live action escape rooms and the webcomic Homestuck, and it’s obvious adventure games became more culturally significant after their “death.”
(Image credit: Double Fine)
Astonishing work was—and still is—made in AGS. The gunky Amiga-Paint noir ofGemini Rue, the metahumour about point-and-click tropes in theBen And Dan series, andSoviet Unterzӧgesdorf’suse of outdated game design to reinforce its perma-80s setting all come out of an ageing scene of purists capable of getting the references. Even as more developers abandoned AGS for platform-agnostic, flexible modern engines, this classicist subculture remained both developer and target audience.
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Why do trad adventure games stick to this ancient formula as firmly as a pulley sticks to a rubber chicken? Because the genre is based on the item combination puzzle, a guess-what-number-I’m-thinking of game that is always a couple of clicks away from gibberish. While your character’s inventory functions as a pocketful of Chekhov’s guns, if the player ever knows for sure how an item will be used, it’s a spoiler—developers have a choice of either clearly telegraphing the solutions to the puzzles, giving them the dramatic satisfaction of a tax return, or basing them on the kind of twisted logic that let the developers of the 90s squeeze profit out of their premium-rate hint lines.
(Image credit: Sierra)
A timeless craving
Image1of3(Image credit: Cosmic Void)(Image credit: Cosmic Void)(Image credit: Cosmic Void)
Image1of3(Image credit: Cosmic Void)(Image credit: Cosmic Void)(Image credit: Cosmic Void)
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(Image credit: Cosmic Void)(Image credit: Cosmic Void)(Image credit: Cosmic Void)
(Image credit: Cosmic Void)(Image credit: Cosmic Void)(Image credit: Cosmic Void)
(Image credit: Cosmic Void)
(Image credit: Cosmic Void)
(Image credit: Cosmic Void)
(Image credit: Cosmic Void)
(Image credit: Cosmic Void)
(Image credit: Cosmic Void)
(Image credit: Cosmic Void)
(Image credit: Cosmic Void)
(Image credit: Cosmic Void)
(Image credit: Cosmic Void)
(Image credit: Cosmic Void)
(Image credit: Cosmic Void)
(Image credit: Cosmic Void)
(Image credit: Cosmic Void)
(Image credit: Cosmic Void)
A slight bum note in the nostalgic presentation is the soundtrack, which occasionally goes into sort of a synthwave-lite that evokes an aspirational ’80s rather than the geeky prog-scapes of the visuals.
More revealing about the spirit of the game is the voice acting, recorded in wildly differing quality, drawing attention to its internet-based, community contribution nature. The casting is appealingly demented—characters turn up with accents you wouldn’t expect them to have. Ellis Knight, the 20-year-old voice actor who plays Leo, is the star—his character was clearly written to be an American (words like “Tylenol” and “candy” sound jagged coming out of his posh-English mouth) but his Inbetweeners version of a beach bum is an amusingly off-centre interpretation of the archetype, and he hits the emotional beat in each dialogue box about noxious socks.
More than anything, Twilight Oracle is the kind of game where its crowdfunders were asked to contribute jokes, which are written on posters pinned up in various places. When you click, Leo will read them all out, even the ones that aren’t funny. At one point, the €150-tier backers show on screen as portraits, underscoring another character’s assertion that heroes can just be “normal people” like Leo.
It’s thanking the people who came together to make the game possible, but also a satisfying emotional beat in the story. At a time when where AI-generated content fills the internet with shiny mediocrity and big studios make elaborate open world games where no real creative vision is present, trad adventure games are utterly reliant on humans craving that very specific timeless flavor of frustration.
Twilight Oraclemight be inward-looking, but inward is where our heart lives.
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